Updated 8:26 am, Monday, March 26, 2012

Mariachi students in Juan Ortiz's Palo Alto College class had no idea they were being taught by a Grammy winner until he recently pulled two golden gramophones from a cardboard box in his car trunk.

Ortiz, 57, received the weighty trophies because of his violin work on Little Joe y La Familia's album “Recuerdos,” which won the 2010 Grammy for Best Tejano Album and a 2011 Latin Grammy in the same category.

But the West Side native just let his students know after the awards arrived in the mail in January. He said he was too immersed in teaching to go to the ceremony.

“If I put (the Grammys) in a display case, I'm still the same person,” said Ortiz, adding that stowing them in cardboard “keeps me humble.”

Ortiz has propagated a love of both music and education in his students, including Carlos Alvarez, who is now part of the Texas chapter of the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys. Alvarez said he wasn't a big fan of education until he came to Palo Alto and studied under the magnificently mustached Ortiz.

Photo: SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Musician Juan Ortiz smiles while teaching his mariachi class at Palo Alto College. Ortiz won two Grammys with the group Little Joe y Familia. (Thursday March 22, 2012) John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Musician Juan Ortiz smiles while teaching his mariachi class at Palo Alto College. Ortiz won two Grammys with the group Little Joe y Familia. (Thursday March 22, 2012) John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Photo: SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Juan Ortiz (center) smiles Thursday March 22, 2012 while playing music in the mariachi class he teaches at Palo Alto College. Ortiz has won two Grammys but has kept pretty quiet about it. Playing on the right is student Carlton Galvez. John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Juan Ortiz (center) smiles Thursday March 22, 2012 while playing music in the mariachi class he teaches at Palo Alto College. Ortiz has won two Grammys but has kept pretty quiet about it. Playing on the right

Current Palo Alto students said Ortiz is a master of developing class camaraderie.

For instance, the advanced mariachi class discovered it was a student's birthday this week. As the practice session concluded, Ortiz plucked a guitarrón and led them in serenading the girl.

“He gets us, how we play and everything,” said Lesley Gonon, 19, a violinist in the class.

Ortiz's appreciation of the students' musical exuberance may stem from how hard it was for him to enter his craft. Raised in a strict Southern Baptist household that frowned on mariachi music as something heard in cantinas, he initially planned to become an opera singer. His mother was a music minister and began teaching him to play the piano at age 5.

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But after an opera audition in New York City didn't go his way, Ortiz returned to study at San Antonio College and at the former Texas A&I University in Kingsville.

He didn't fully dedicate himself to mariachi music until the mid-1970s. Eventually he formed Mariachi Campanas de America, still in existence after more than 30 years.

“This was non-sacred music and I had to go against the (church) establishment,” Ortiz said, but things have changed and today he instructs a mariachi group at an area Baptist church.

Ortiz faced another challenge when he decided to take up the violin at age 21. By the second lesson, his music mentor told him, “You know what, Juan? You started too late and your hands are too fat,” Ortiz recalled. “He lit a fire in me when he told me that.”

So, Ortiz taught himself. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he was a music instructor at San Antonio Independent School District before becoming Palo Alto's first mariachi instructor in 1994, he said. He also teaches at Our Lady of the Lake University.